Democrats are planning on continuing the fight for reforming the nation's health care system.

When asked on the subject today, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) said "I don't see that as a possibility. We will have something."

Well, that's nice. Something.

I suppose that something is better than nothing, but in the end, if we end up with health care reform lite, which is what many in Congress are urging the administration to pursue, we will have no meaningful reform, only a photo-op for the President and members of Congress to trumpet as "success".

But success it will not be. In fact, a stripped-down version of health care reform legislation will do more harm than good, as it will make more difficult the introduction of the real meaningful reform that is needed, and will be unavoidable, eventually.

That is the question that many reform supporters are asking themselves this week, after the surprise election last Tuesday of Republican Scott Brown to a Senate seat in Massachusetts previously held by the late Edward Kennedy.

Senator Kennedy was famously a champion of health care reform, who worked tirelessly towards the goal of improving health care access for all Americans practically until the day that he died.

Now, the fear (and the hope of HCR foes) is that the one additional vote gained by Republicans in the Senate will be enough to stop all further work on reform legislation.

Why would one vote make such a big difference?

Prior to Sen. Brown's election, the Democratic senators who were shepherding the various reform bills through the twists and turns of the law-making process, held a 60 seat "super majority" in the Senate, ensuring enough votes to pass the legislation even if ALL Republican senators voted "Nay" (which they did on a staggeringly regular basis).

Now the Republicans have the power to "filibuster", that is to block the legislation from moving forward.

The Republicans are widely expected to use this power.

Now what?

The Democrats in the Senate have a few options, however, none of them appear to be palatable to the leadership:

• They can try to pass the legislation in the week to two before Sen. Brown is formally seated

• They can ask the House of Representatives to pass the Senate bill, and then "ram" the bill through the Senate through a process called reconciliation, which requires only a 51-seat majority

• They can try to convince Sen. Brown, who professes to be very independent, and comes from a state which already has enacted sweeping health insurance and health care reform legislation, that HCR is for the good of the country and he should support it

But none of these options are likely to work.

Instead, the likely next step is a significant slow-down in the push for reform, and a return to the status-quo, or in other words, nothing has changed, except that many more Americans are now possibly aware for the need for reform, while many more, apparently, are now completely against it for reasons that they themselves probably don't understand very well.

Sen. Joe Lieberman, (I-CT) is adamant on wanting to water down the health care reform bill, to the point that the overall effect of it will represent nothing more than a cosmetic change over the status quo.

As the senator from Connecticut, a state with some of the largest insurance companies headquartered within its borders (and consequently within its tax and voter base), Lieberman is playing fast and loose with the health of all Americans for the benefit of a small number of citizens of its state (and for the benefit of his own reelection efforts, to be sure).

To summarize, Sen. Lieberman is "dead set" against the idea of the public option (in essence, government run and funded health care), as well as the Medicare buy-in provisions of the bill, which would have allowed Americans as young as 55 to buy into the Medicare program, already the largest medical plan in the country.

Obviously, both of these provisions of the overall bill would go a long way towards covering the nearly 50 million Americans who are currently uninsured. Make no mistake: conservatives in Congress have been against any such provisions in the bill from the get-go, and they will fight tooth-and-nail to keep them out of the final framework.

Now, the leadership in the Congress will need to find a Republican vote to bring the total of "YES" votes to 60, the filibuster-proof majority that will be needed to pass the HCR bill with any meanigful reform included.

Odds are that Harry Reid will try to lean on Sen. Olympia Snowe of Maine, a moderate Republican, to help pass the bill.

And the dirty business of democracy goes on.

President Obama spoke earlier today on the progress that's been made in Congress on the health care reform bill.

Lots of bipartisan work, apparently. Who would have thunk it?